The next election will see voters punish the Prime Minister and her party for presiding over a ‘lost’ decade [Image: Getty].

Commentators who have been holding on to Theresa May’s high-ish poll ratings for dear life are about to have a nasty shock, if this Independent article has any truth to it.

Living standards in the UK are plummeting and the Conservatives cannot blame Labour for the pain.

The damage has been done by Tory policies – carried out under the lie that “We’re all in this together”.

Theresa May promised to govern for everybody, including the JAMS – those who are ‘Just About Managing’. Instead she will squeeze them dry.

Her chancellor, Philip Hammond, has refused to invest in people, meaning there is no hope from government funding.

It’s a shame that the author of this piece, Andrew Grice, is unable to keep his own political bias out of it.

“Labour is off the public’s radar,” he writes. Is that not because influential periodicals like the Independent are saying so?

And if that is true, then why is Mr Grice using Labour to point out the inadequacies of Tory Brexit policy? He writes: “Even if voters blamed the income squeeze on Brexit, that would not necessarily spare May. Labour is already attacking what it calls a ‘shambolic Tory Brexit’.”

And if “Labour still trails the Tories on economic competence”, that can only be with the connivance of commentators like Mr Grice.

If everybody were to make their judgement according to the facts – as laid out in this Vox Political article – Labour would certainly be faring much better.

But then, as that article points out, rich media bosses want to con their readers and viewers into voting for the party that helps rich media bosses.

The next election will be fought amid a “feel-bad factor”, the opposite of what any governing party wants. The decline in living standards will have happened on the Tories’ watch.

While the Autumn Statement looked thin, it told us a lot about the May Government… Philip Hammond did very little to alleviate the pain that is coming on living standards, as inflation rises faster than wages. The bleak forecasts from the Institute for Fiscal Studies and Resolution Foundation think tanks should worry May, as they show how hard the “Jams” will be squeezed. She will not meet the great expectations she aroused in July without a major change of course.

The Tories are already trying to repeat their old trick of blaming Labour – this time for the wage stagnation since the 2008 crash… But it won’t wash this time. The Tories argue that the think tanks’ numbers do not take account of the higher personal tax allowance and claim that “real household disposable income” is rising by 2.8 per cent, the highest ever increase. But this won’t cut any ice with the “Jams”if they are worse off overall, as they surely will be.